Let’s talk about Orson Scott Card. Okay! As many of you know, Card wrote a famous and popular book that will soon be released as a famous movie (whether it will be popular remains to be seen; my bet is yes). Orson Scott Card is also a famous bigot. I am not going to link to all of the articles (UPDATE: I will link to one that it is a pretty good rundown), because they are readily available with Google and also that is a lot of work, but Card has done some straight up bad stuff – he’s said that it’s impossible for gay people to be good Mormons, that laws should be constructed specifically to punish gay people in order to discourage them from gaying it up, that homosexuality is a genetic “mix-up”, that if America legalizes gay marriage then all the good people need to rise up and overthrow the government, in his retelling of Hamlet he pretty clearly equates homosexuality with pedophilia, and has flat-out said that homosexuality is caused by sexual abuse. He has also said that he has gay friends, which frankly just seems like a bald-faced lie. (more…)

Yeah, I know. This is a real thing, anyway, and the number one reason that I’m working on it is that hardly anyone every invites me to direct (and by “hardly anyone” I mean “no one”), so I am going to take the opportunities that come my way. But despite my base craving for acclaim and attention, I was still hesitant to touch this one with anything short of a very long pole, and so sat down and did some soul-searching, trying to reason my way through it. This is what I came up with.

It’s certainly possible that he’s a malicious and cynical liar, but I don’t think it could be true that he’s JUST malicious and cynical, as even someone completely disinterested in truth would probably do a better job of framing his arguments. Say what you like about William F. Buckley, for instance, but at least he didn’t usually sound like an idiot. Whether Gregory Kane is a complete bonehead, or just mostly a bonehead and otherwise a cynic, it’s pretty clear that the quality of “boneheadedness” is a central element in his analysis.

John Shnatter, founder and owner of Papa John’s Pizza, not too long ago said that providing healthcare for all his employees would cost about 14 cents per pizza, and that, in order to protect shareholder returns, that cost would get passed on to the customers by amortizing it throughout Papa John’s goods.

Pizza Hut. Here is how you can both afford to give everyone healthcare AND improve your market share.

I don’t generally like to talk about politics here, since that’s usually when assholes show up and threaten to disrupt my naturally cool demeanor. But Penn Jillette wrote this piece for CNN, and I felt like I had to answer it. I felt this way for two reasons: the first is that I really like Penn & Teller, and the second is that I think he’s cheating.

I know that I’ve said before that I don’t like it when we get really involved in politics here at TQP, because I’m displeased with the number of crazies that appear from the woodwork. This is true; I have trepidation even as I’m writing this. However, I’ve been puzzling over something for a while, and I want to try and address it using the secret weapon of the Writer: Language (the thing that means stuff).

This is going to come out of nowhere, it will seem to you (as it seems to me), but I need to write something, and so today this is what I’ll write. Over on Gawker, they’ve got a little bit about UCSD’s racism problem (hint: it begins and ends with douchebags). In the comments section, someone posted – as someone always does on articles like this – the lyrics from “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” from the musical Avenue Q.